First, an apology to Hugh Laurie. It’s not that I ever thought him untalented or unintelligent. But when I was a boy, watching the sketch show A Bit of Fry & Laurie, I dimly formed the impression that, of this debonair partnership’s two components, he was the lesser; that the cleverer jokes must have been the work of Stephen Fry, and that Laurie, the sweet, smiling, affable-looking chap, just did the musical bits and the falling over.

I see now that, like some twitchingly paranoid EastEnders nut who harangues Charlie Brooks in the street because he thinks she really is that nasty Janine Butcher, I was confusing the actor with the role. Because in four series of A Bit of Fry & Laurie, its two stars played the same roles time and again – or at least, modulated versions of the same role.

Laurie would play the naïve: gormless shoppers, gulping schoolboys, doomed employees. Fry, by contrast, would play the worldly: condescending shopkeepers, barking headmasters, harrumphing bosses. Fry got the witty lines; Laurie got to look like a simpleton. It was the same in Jeeves and Wooster (Fry the omniscient butler, Laurie his hapless employer) and Blackadder Goes Forth (Fry the bellowing general, Laurie the imbecilic lieutenant).

Fry and Laurie Reunited (G.O.L.D.) put me right. A documentary in which the two appeared together on television for the first time in 15 years, it showed how different they are, both from each other and from the comedy characters they once played. Laurie was dry, wry, drawling, droll; his eyes glinted with mischief, like a tomcat sighting a shrew. Fry, in his presence, giggled like a girl, or burbled dreamily.

The following sums it up. Before the two sat down to chat about their careers, they were filmed separately, with the producers cutting back and forth between them. Each was asked to explain how they’d first met. It was at Cambridge in 1980, and Laurie was playing Fry a song he’d written; that far, their recollections tallied. But then…

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Fry: “He had this guitar – £5, came from Woolworths.” Laurie: “Absolute b------s. That guitar didn’t come from Woolworths. It was a Yamaha guitar – £75. I’ve still got it.” Fry: “Any time anyone gave him a more expensive guitar or better guitar, he didn’t like it as much as this Woolworths guitar.” Laurie: “Now I doubt everything he’s ever said to me.”

That mismatch isn’t merely to do with memory; it’s to do with temperament, worldview. Fry’s recollection was mistily sentimental; Laurie’s, matter-of-fact.

Anyway, never mind who’s cleverer. It was together that they worked so well. Their comedy, though less anarchic than Monty Python’s, treated us to the same pleasure: that of watching very intelligent men be very silly. A sketch that encapsulated this style of educated absurdity, included in G.O.L.D.’s documentary, depicted 18th-century gentlemen about to duel. “Sir David,” said the referee to Laurie, “I understand the choice is yours: sword or pistol?” Laurie plumped for sword – “the only weapon for a gentleman”.

“That means, Mr Van Hoyle,” said the referee, turning to Fry, “you have the pistol…”

Ancient Worlds (BBC Two), although an entirely different type of programme, was both intelligent and silly too. Intelligent in the things it told us; silly, at times, in the way it illustrated them.

Last night’s episode, the third of six, was about Ancient Greece. The greatest, by which I mean the maddest, of the Ancient Greeks were the Spartans. They had, said presenter Richard Miles, no written laws and no money. Aged seven, all boys were packed off for 13 years of military training. “In the all-male barracks,” said Miles, “homosexuality was obligatory.” He also said Spartan women “enjoyed sexual freedoms that were unheard of elsewhere in the ancient world”, although I wish he’d explained with whom they enjoyed them, what with the men being obliged to have eyes only for each other.

Ideally, Ancient Worlds would be on the radio. The problem with making a TV programme about a civilisation that now exists largely as rubble and statuary is that you don’t have much to fill the screen with. We would often hear Miles in voice-over, while the camera looked about desperately for an apt visual metaphor. Some of the results were difficult to watch with a straight face.

“It was said that after the Persian war,” intoned Miles, “Sparta slept.” Cut to shot of modern-day Greek man in jeans and T-shirt snoozing on a bench. “Sparta dithered – but finally, prompted by fear as much as fighting spirit… it struck.” Cut to shot of one cat springing at another in a flurry of miaows.